Fifty years ago Captain Kirk and the crew
of the starship Enterprise began their journey into space — the final
frontier. Now, as the newest Star Trek film hits cinemas, the NASA/ESA
Hubble space telescope is also exploring new frontiers, observing
distant galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell S1063 as part of the
Frontier Fields programme.

Space... the final frontier. These are the stories of the Hubble
Space Telescope. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds
and to boldly look where no telescope has looked before.

The newest target of Hubble’s mission is the distant galaxy cluster
Abell S1063, potentially home to billions of strange new worlds.

This view of the cluster, which can be seen in the centre of the
image, shows it as it was four billion years ago. But Abell S1063 allows
us to explore a time even earlier than this, where no telescope has
really looked before. The huge mass of the cluster distorts and
magnifies the light from galaxies that lie behind it due to an effect
called gravitational lensing.
This allows Hubble to see galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to
observe and makes it possible to search for, and study, the very first
generation of galaxies in the Universe. “Fascinating”, as a famous Vulcan might say.

The first results from the data on Abell S1063 promise some
remarkable new discoveries. Already, a galaxy has been found that is
observed as it was just a billion years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers have also identified sixteen background galaxies whose
light has been distorted by the cluster, causing multiple images of them
to appear on the sky. This will help astronomers to improve their
models of the distribution of both ordinary and dark matter in the
galaxy cluster, as it is the gravity from these that causes the
distorting effects. These models are key to understanding the mysterious
nature of dark matter.

Abell S1063 is not alone in its ability to bend light from background
galaxies, nor is it the only one of these huge cosmic lenses to be
studied using Hubble. Three other clusters have already been observed as
part of the Frontier Fields programme,
and two more will be observed over the next few years, giving
astronomers a remarkable picture of how they work and what lies both
within and beyond them [1].

Data gathered from the previous galaxy clusters were studied by teams
all over the world, enabling them to make important discoveries, among
them galaxies that existed only hundreds of million years after the Big
Bang (heic1523) and the first predicted appearance of a gravitationally lensed supernova (heic1525).

Such an extensive international collaboration would have made Gene
Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek, proud. In the fictional world
Roddenberry created, a diverse crew work together to peacefully explore
the Universe. This dream is partially achieved by the Hubble programme
in which the European Space Agency (ESA), supported by 22 member states,
and NASA collaborate to operate one of the most sophisticated
scientific instruments in the world. Not to mention the scores of other
international science teams that cross state, country and continental
borders to achieve their scientific aims.

Notes

[1] The Hubble Frontier Fields is a three-year, 840-orbit programme
which will yield the deepest views of the Universe to date, combining
the power of Hubble with the gravitational amplification of light around
six different galaxy clusters to explore more distant regions of space
than could otherwise be seen.

More InformationThe Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)